"Facts are obsolete," said P. Nichols, the contact given for the press release who claimed Nichols was his last name but refused to confirm his entire name, the name of the Republican PAC he says backed the "study" or any of the people behind the actual report he insisted did truly exist. And no, he wouldn't send us a copy of it.

"...the contact given for the press release who claimed Nichols was his last name but refused to confirm his entire name, the name of the Republican PAC he says backed the "study" or any of the people behind the actual report he insisted did truly exist. And no, he wouldn't send us a copy of it."

Surveys repeatedly show Fox News viewers are less infromed on the issues, or less educated, or more apt to believe b.s. and all you have to do is put out a phony survey to refute all the rest.

kid_icarus:make me some tea: Cewley: may be made up, but totally believable.

Not really. I know plenty of very bright people who watch FoxNews religiously. That mindset has nothing to do with intelligence, and everything to do with brainwashing.

Absolutely. Someone could be very intelligent and yet Fox tells a narrative of a worldview that they want to believe. It could happen to anyone.

It would be nice if they were actually right--all Fox News basically does is crap on people that are less fortunate than they are for being less fortunate than they are. It basically parrots the 1950's ideals of America and tries jamming it into a 2012 framework. It's a massive failure--but If I were a moron I'd be happy to feel that addressing problems was just blaming other people for them.

IQ is not fitting here. There needs to be a Reality Quotient that measures a persons world view against known facts. This number should be displayed on their Facebook page. You may want to hire people with a high IQ and low RQ but you don't want to be friends with them.

But the interesting part is why they made it up. This was done by people on the right who wanted to shame people from getting their news from play-fast-and-loose with facts FOX News. And they did it by making up facts.

Decillion:IQ is not fitting here. There needs to be a Reality Quotient that measures a persons world view against known facts. This number should be displayed on their Facebook page. You may want to hire people with a high IQ and low RQ but you don't want to be friends with them.

Excellent idea. I propose we do the same for voting: a short test has to be taken at the poll and the person's vote weighted according to his Reality Quotient score. Perhaps the Reality Institute (a subsidiary of the Intelligence Institute) could be commissioned to write it.

Goes to show that Dems/libs will believe anything that is told to them with no need for actual facts as long as it is against republicans/conservatives. Just like how dems/libs believe Obama is not a Muslim.

SomeoneDumb:cman: People believe things that are outlandish if they fall within ones self preconceptions.

...and that's true no matter their politics. We's all just humans, liking what we like and agreeing with things that go along with what we thought before.

It's hard to break a world view. I commend anyone who had the courage to change theirs when presented with new facts.

It's easier when you are younger. My parents had the same birthday. I thought everyone's parents had the same birthday. It never even occurred to me that this was not the case until I was 7 or 8. It was an instant shock to learn the truth. I'll never forget it. Figuring out Santa for yourself gradually is one thing but having a truth told to you is something else. My first reaction was predictable. Denial.

Given that IQ is generally defined to have a standard deviation of 15, and Fox News has millions of veiwers, the odds that the average IQ of Fox News watchers is 1.3 standard deviations below the average IQ of the US population are 0.00%.

It's almost a meta analysis. The "study" says that Fox News veiwers are idiots, but in turn, any one who believes the results of the study actually demonstrates a lack of intelligence.